


Salvage

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: Cozy Little Antique Shop Where Every Item For Sale Is Cursed And/Or Haunted, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-07 01:04:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20300899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: A zee-captain comes across an odd little shop in Whither.





	Salvage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syrupwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/gifts).

> I'm posting it in hopes that Sunless Sea is still a fandom you're interested in receiving fic for, but if not, then I won't be offended if you choose to ignore it.

Whither is a curious place, by either definition. Seen from one angle: a last haven clinging to the edge of Void's Approach, an austere cluster of wooden houses and shopfronts huddled up against the cold. A human place known for a few unusual customs, no more and no less. From another: a city of secrets and questions without answer, a place of gods and things that aren't gods and priests that never hesitate to remind you that the powers of the world are hungry. From every angle, it's a frost-rimed maze of twisting streets, bigger than it looks from outside. You've journeyed here before, every time you brave the Boreal Reach, and every time, you find something new.

Today, it's a shop. A small one, unassuming, set between a gradually-eroding Salt-shrine and a little red chapel that you make a point of avoiding. The sign above the door is weathered and peeling, and says, simply, _Salvage._

A bell above the door rings when you step inside, and a Blithe Salvager greets you from her place at the countertop, where two oil lamps cast a warm glow throughout the room. Her face is finely wrinkled, her hair the color of salt, but her eyes are sharp and dark.

The front of the shop holds nothing much of worth, it seems. You look around at wares that might indeed have been pulled from the zee, or washed up on shore: shelves of waterstained linens and salt-crusted spoons, old crockery, yellowing penny dreadfuls with titles like _The Gruesome and Harrowing Tale of the Butcher of Bad Monkey Row._ As you consider them, a cat leaps down from the countertop, twines around your ankles, and tries, with limited success, to eat your boots.

“What brings you here?” the Salvager asks, with a smile that crinkles the corners of her eyes.

“Just wandering,” you say.

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be,” you say, and she nods and invites you, with an expansive gesture, to peruse the wares.

You turn to the books first, though it's hard to say whether there will be any worth buying. The villain of _The Gruesome and Harrowing Tale_ turns out, when you check the end, to be an actual monkey. Alongside it, you find romances, recipe books, a zee-farer's journal that ends too abruptly for comfort. You flip through a book of pastoral poetry with no author listed, thinking you might buy it for your Wistful Deviless, who likes such things. It's filled with charming illustrations of goatherds and forest maids, decked in flowers and laurel leaves, cavorting beneath the light of two suns. The drawings are inked in a way that makes them seem to move when you turn the pages. _Clever_, you think – but unsettling in a way you're not sure the artist intended, and when you flip back to take a closer look, the first scene is not the one you remember. It's dark and lonely, midnight, and the landscape is the same but the temples are shattered and overgrown. You must have missed that page, you suppose, the first time through. You return it to its place, thinking the Deviless might not like it so much after all. 

But you notice, as you move further from the door, that not everything here is so damaged as you'd first thought. Like Whither itself, the place seems larger from the inside, and it takes you a moment to notice the finer things amid all the clutter, though once you do, it's curiously hard to look away. Some of them, it feels like you know, or ought to: the china dolls, the music box, the small hand mirror with a crack right down the center. There's a sadness hanging about the amber jewelry that sinks into your fingers when you touch it; amber gathers memories, you've heard, like silk gathers dust, and when you close your eyes, you find yourself in a gleaming ballroom – color, music, laughter, light reflected in all directions like you never lost the sun. You'd worn an amber-colored dress that day, and danced with a prince – of _where_, precisely, he wouldn't say.

Something scratches your leg. You yelp in pain, and the necklace clatters back to the table with all the other trinkets, the perfume bottles and clockwork toys you know to leave alone. The cat sits blinking up at you; amusement flickers in its baleful yellow eyes when you find your fingers drifting back toward the fallen necklace and hastily pull your hand away. You don't need to lose yourself in someone else's life, even if she seems keen to invite you. You're already a little less certain that when you turn back Londonward, it won't be to ballrooms and gemstones and a noblewoman's sorrows. 

You leave the jewelry and its memories behind, and wander on. The cat follows, yowling for attention. Petting it is a bad idea, you discover, if you like the idea of retaining all your fingers.

“Don't mind her,” the Salvager calls from the counter. “She's a sweetheart, really.”

The wares grow older as you make your way towards the back, where the shelves grow narrower and the crates are piled in precarious, labyrinthine stacks. You linger by a suit of Fourth City armor, and find nearby a horsehead fiddle in fine repair. It wants, you're certain, to be played again. You touch it, and your fingers ache for the bow. You have the uncomfortable sense that should you _start_ playing it, it would not want you to stop.

Jade jewelry, after that, and a collection of ceramic plates painted with images from tales you don't recognize. Clay tablets. A bowl of silver coins, all of them stained with something that looks like rust, and a plain skyglass knife that slips in your hand and nicks your finger before you set it carefully down. The cat hisses and bolts, leaving you alone; despite its temperament, you miss the company.

You've traveled a long way, you realize, when you look back towards the front of the shop. The light is different here. The Salvager's cheery lamps don't stretch this far, and the air is dim and dusty. The things here aren't human-made any longer, with the exception of zee-glass weathered smooth. There are geological specimens: iron ore, limestone, shale. Ammonites. A little farther, and you find stone plaques marked with strange sigils in a language it feels like you ought to know. They're hot to the touch, though the air back here is cold, and heavier than even stone should be. 

And there – behind stacks of boxes filled with meteorite fragments and pale driftwood, in a dusty bottle, you catch a gleam of light. You pull it from the shadows – carefully, _carefully_. It shouldn't be possible, finding a soul like this in the back shelves of some shop, no matter how unusual. But if it's what you think, then it's what the Campaigner needs to cure her ailment, and so you wrap the shining thing in a scarf for safekeeping and take it to the counter, trying not to let yourself dwell on what you might be holding in your hands.

Walking back to the front of the shop feels like stepping through centuries. The air grows lighter, warmer, the shelves open out and the things they hold become more familiar. You move slow as a diver rising towards the surface, mindful of what happens to those who return to the human world too quickly – but soon enough, the lamps are there, and the windows piled with lacre, and the dreadful sensationalist novels.

The Salvager waits placidly, her hands folded. The cat is asleep on her lap, perfectly well-behaved. She takes the strange soul-jar you've brought her, runs her fingers over the glass with care, holds it up and murmurs something to it in a language you don't know. It's precious to her. You can tell that much from the way she holds it, like a mother holds a child. You wonder if she'll decline to sell it at all, only tuck it away and keep it with her, but it doesn't really belong here in this lamplit world, and if you can recognize that, then she surely does.

“How much will it cost?” you ask. The rulers of five cities must have asked that once, and been surprised to learn the answer, but you've lived your life at zee, and you're not sure that any price can surprise you.

The Salvager smiles and says, in her Whithern way, “How much are you willing to pay?”


End file.
